SEO Elements & Checklists

SEO Checklist Basics

“Here at 561 We Believe that Organization & Understanding Are Essential for Confident Decision Making.”

The following elements are a small selection of essential elements to optimizing a website for modern search engines:

Head Section Optimization

Optimizing the head section of a website plays a major role in giving search engines the basic information they need to index your site for terms that will bring you business.

Basic Meta Tags

The titles and meta descriptions are always the starting point when optimizing a website for search.

Not only do title tags offer useful information to search engines themselves about the nature of the website, but because of the way browsers and search engines use them, they are important as sales points for users as well.

Meta descriptions offer no ranking value in the new Google algorithm but they serve a vital purpose in “selling the click” so to speak. Great SEO specialists can use meta descriptions as an undervalued insider technique to increase CTR, which DOES impact both search rank and how many visitors you get to your website.

The keyword tag no longer has SEO value except as an organization method for SEO specialists working on the back end of your website.

Additional Meta Tags

Usually used on a per industry or per case basis, additional meta tags such as the robots meta tag, or copyright meta tag may be used.

Facebook Open Graph Meta Tags

With the introduction of Facebook’s graph search came a necessity to optimize for social in a completely new way. Facebook introduced a whole toolkit for webmasters and SEOs looking to turn their websites into shareable objects. With Facebook’s Meta tags installed on a website, an additional opportunity for search results and website traffic is available to your business.

Rel Tags

In website design, rel tags have traditionally been reserved for things like css and external scripts. Recently, several standards have emerged that allow SEOs to offer even more information to search engines such as original sources of content, authorship for articles and copyright information. These tools are often industry specific, or used on a case by case basis.

URL Optimization

One of the most time-tested and valuable techniques for search engine optimization is URL renaming. Our SEOs audit the entire site, renaming any static URLs to take advantage of geographic location and focus keywords.

Image Optimization

Images can offer a surprising amount of additional information to search engines. Our SEO specialists look at every image on your site, renaming the file and adding keyword driven titles and ALT text as appropriate.

Directory/Search Engine Submission

It’s no big secret that search engines value websites with lots of inbound links. Unfortunately many SEO companies have abused this practice and created a huge amount of sites that offer ‘garbage links’ or links that the major search engines essentially ignore, or even frown upon. At 561Media our SEOs submit websites to a solid base of directories and search engines that offer valuable, respectable links through proven ‘white-hate’ strategies.

Measurement Tools

Without measurement, it is impossible to tell if what we are doing is working. At 561Media we install Google Analytics on every website we optimize to measure traffic and the results of our SEO initiatives.

We also go a step further, setting up Google & Bing Webmaster Tools and linking them to client websites so we can measure and adjust the behavior of search engines crawling sites.

In many cases we also set up conversion and/or remarketing tracking and run the analytics, conversion tracking, and remarketing through the Google Tag Manager to ensure compliance and accuracy without bogging down your site code with multiple (and possibly conflicting) snippets.

Final Touches

To further measure and control search engine behavior on websites, our search engine optimization experts verify an xml (or appropriate) sitemap, robots.txt file, HTTP vs HTTPS, www vs no www, proper canonical tags, and a whole host of other variables with Google/Bing Webmaster Tools for every site we optimize.

Building on the Basics

“We Help You Implement Search Marketing Strategies That Work.”

As mentioned before, there is not a one size fits all solution for effective SEO. If you find one, it probably doesn’t work very well.

The basics of 561Media’s search engine optimization process works for most businesses, but when you commit to a search engine optimization campaign with 561Media, we always go a step further. We custom tailor all our search engine optimization campaigns to fit the specific business/industry of the client, using all the tools at our disposal.

Some examples of how different business models and industries search engine optimization plans may differ:

E-commerce Search Engine Optimization

E-commerce sites often benefit greatly from Google Merchant Center product feed optimization. New structured data standards (more at: schema.org) can also greatly benefit an e-commerce site trying to get its products properly organized and indexed by search engines. Because ecommerce websites generally have to compete with very broad terms at the national or even international level, our marketing specialists almost always recommend online press release distribution to help jump start the ecommerce optimization process.

New Products/Event Based Industries

A company that has an exciting new product or specializes in events has a lot of potential for social media optimization. Building momentum on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest & Google Plus can greatly benefit a brand’s notoriety, and with a well thought out linking plan, can give a central website a big push in search engine results.

Service Based Industries

Industries such as legal, medical, manufacturing etc. often do best with a fairly straightforward, local search optimization campaign. Efforts and marketing dollars are generally best spent targeting service areas and long tail keywords to produce the highest ROI possible. Also, an emphasis on submission to big directories such as Angie’s List, Yelp, DMOZ, Etc., helps bring in additional traffic. In addition to organic SEO, a small boost with search ads or content network ads will often help increase traffic and results.

THE BOTTOM LINE… YOUR BOTTOM LINE

At the end of the day, you want to make money. That’s the end goal of any search engine marketing campaign or search engine optimization initiative. When you hire 561Media to handle your marketing, we will design a search engine marketing plan that fits your brand, your goals and your budget.

Contact us today to see how we can start driving more customers to your business!